Month: January 1999

BANGKOK, Thailand; BRITS, South Africa––
The five survivors among a group of six young Asian elephants
whom Thailand exported to Indonesia in October 1997 returned
home on December 31 to floral necklaces, cheering crowds, a
welcoming banner at dockside in Ao Makham, and all the
bananas, sugar cane, and pineapples they could eat.
Presiding over the feast were prime ministerial secretary
Wattana Muangsuk, Phuket member of parliament
Anchalee Theppabutr, and Phuket governor Padet Insang.
Explained Attaya Chuenniran of the Bangkok Post,
“The five beasts, and another, who died in Indonesia, were
sent with their mahouts in October 1997 under a 10-year contract
to help their Indonesian counterparts catch wild elephants,”
who were allegedly terrorizing the countryside in the
wake of fires set to clear brush and facilitate rainforest logging.

Gloria Marie De MartiniStradner, 72, died on December 22 from
cancer of the lungs and brain, discovered
only six weeks earlier. For more than 50
years Stradner fed, neutered, and tried to
find homes for dogs and cats she found abandoned
at the Evergreen, Mount Neboh, and
Cypress Hills cemeteries in Brooklyn and
Queens, funding her work and supporting
herself with jobs in catering halls. “I would
estimate she saved thousands of animals,”
Last Post Animal Sanctuary manager Jeanne
Toomey told New York Times obituarist
Richard Severo. Stradner had no known relatives.
Fellow animal rescuers Michael and
Anne Marie Puccino reportedly took care of
her own two dogs, Lance and Ivy.

Perhaps the most obvious yet least
remarked of all the changes that humans have
imposed on the canine lifestyle is that dogs in
the wild never choose to live in anything that
resembles the quarters we tend to give them.
Throughout the world, given their choice,
dogs live in dugouts. Fox, wolf, dingo, jackal,
coyote, African wild dog or Carolina dog,
they all either enlarge the burrows of prey or
dig their own.
The first virtue of Leo Grillo’s Straw
Bale Dog House technique is not that it provides
cheap and durable shelter, though
DELTA Rescue builds each house for $400
including stucco finish. Nor is it that straw
bale building is quick, though with practice
each house can be made it less time than it
takes to watch the video. Nor is it that straw
bale dog houses save space: the roof of each
house becomes a patio/balcony as big as the
area the house occupies.

Billed as “a feature documentary
about culture, meat and animals,” A Cow At
My Table is an idiosyncratic and often refreshingly
unpredictable mix of interviews,
excerpts from agriculture industry teachingand-training
films, early 20th century silent
comedies, and undercover videos of abusive
practices mostly made by director/editor
Jennifer Abbott herself.

LYLES, Tenn.; ANAMOSA,
Iowa; SALT LAKE CITY, Utah– – Near
Lyles, Tennessee, the shelterless Hickman
County Humane Society just before Christmas
1998 seized 299 dogs, 38 horses, and various
cats from an alleged puppy mill reportedly
owned by one Patricia Adkisson.
The site was littered, rescuers said,
with the remains of dead dogs.
On January 1, 1999, hoping to keep
a developing neglect case from becoming selfperpetuating,
Florida Humane Society volunteers
cleaned the home of widower Terry
Ruppel, 70, of Lighthouse Point, who surrendered
37 cats after neighbors complained
about filth and stench. Ruppel and his wife of
47 years exhausted their savings trying to fix
up an old house, Fort Lauderdale SunSentinel
staff writer Robert George explained.
Then Ruppel had a stroke, skin cancer, and
kidney cancer, and in August 1998 his wife
died of a sudden heart attack.

BANGKOK, BEIJING––1998, the Chinese “Year
of the Tiger,” ended with an admission from Wang Menghu,
deputy secretary-general of the China Zoological Protection
Association, that the South China population of Asian tigers
has gone to the realm of the yeti––the legendary “abominable
snowman.”
On December 14, Chinese forestry and wildlife conservation
director Zhang Jianlong and colleague Lie Yongfan
told the world through the government news agency Xinhua
that official investigations underway since 1984 have found no
evidence that the yeti ever existed.
“All reported sightings were actually other wild animals,”
Zhang said.
Elaborated Yan Xun, director of the 1,800-squaremile
Shennongjia Reserve, “There are no basic primate foods
such as berries or broadleaf trees in the mountains of
Shennongjia, where most yeti enthusiasts believe the mysterious
creature lives.”

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka– – Eleph-
ant hunting and capture have been banned in
Sri Lanka since 1960.
Now the Sri Lankan tradition of
temple elephant keeping is at risk. None have
been born in captivity in five years; only
seven have been born in half a century.
Often hired to lead processions,
and a magnet for visitors and donations, temple
elephants have long been a mainstay of
the Sri Lankan religious economy. And the
ostentatiously devout like to keep their own
yard elephants. Of the estimated 2,000 elephants
in Sri Lanka, about half are privately
owned. Most are beyond their prime reproductive
years, even if they could be induced
to mate in captivity.
When a baby elephant vanished
from the Pinnawela elephant refuge circa
November 1, wildlife conservation department
deputy director Nandana Atapattu
observed to Susannah Price of the South
China Morning Post that, “Owning an elephant
is extremely prestigious––he could be
sold for a million rupees,” or about $37,000.

Ten animal care organizations in
Contra Costa County, California, led by
Tony LaRussa’s Animal Foundation, have
formed the Contra Costa Animal Welfare
Coalition, a pilot regional alliance to reduce
shelter killing, formed as recommended by
former San Francisco SPCA president
Richard Avanzino as a step toward obtaining
grants from the $200 million Duffield Family
Foundation. Avanzino on January 1 assumed
administration of the foundation, set up by
software magnates Dave and Cheryl Duffield
to help other locales emulate San Francisco’s
success as the first U.S. no-kill city. Contra
Costa County, across San Francisco Bay, has
almost the same human population as San
Francisco, but shelters in the county kill 16.3
animals per 1,000 human residents, just under
the state norm of 18.0 (also the current U.S.
norm), and nearly triple the San Francisco rate
of 5.8. Avanzino told ANIMAL PEOPLE on
January 5 that he is not yet ready to start
receiving inquiries from organizations wishing
to apply for grants, but said he would release
Duffield contact information in time for our
March 1999 edition. Tony LaRussa was
Avanzino’s choice to figurehead the first
model alliance, Avanzino told A N I M A L
PEOPLE earlier, because as one of the winningest
managers in baseball history he symbolizes
teamwork and innovation––and
LaRussa and his wife Elaine have been working
with distinction to help animals since circa
1972, when LaRussa was still an active player.

FUZHOU, China––“An old
Chinese saying, ‘Killing the chicken to scare
the monkey,” may explain the crackdown”
on dissent now underway in China, Melinda
Liu and Russell Watson offered in the
January 11 edition of Newsweek.
“This year brings some anniversaries
that may stir unrest,” they added, citing
the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen
Square massacre, the 40th anniversary of an
unsuccessful Tibetan revolt against Communist
rule, and the 50th anniversary of the
Communist takeover of China itself.
“Killing the chicken to scare the
monkey” may also explain the dog purges
threatened in December in Fuzhou City,
Fujian province, and actually carried out in
Wuhu, Anhui province.

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